Useful Notes / World War II

Edit Locked

Humanity's best and worst were displayed for all the world to see.note Clockwise from top-right: An NSDAP parade, US troops in a LCVP landing craft on the 'D-day' (initiation of mass-combat) of Operation Overlord, the flag of the Soviet Union is raised over the German Reichstag (this is the second, staged, photo), the 'mushroom cloud' immediately following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, US Navy Air Force Douglas SBD Dauntless bombers flying over a Pacific atoll, and Imperial Japanese sailors at attention

"I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?"

World War II, or the Second World War (often abbreviated as WWII or WW2), was a global war fought from 1939note Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland is generally accepted as the start date of World War 2, though several other conflicts that would be incorporated into the larger international conflict were already underway. Many citizens of Russia/the old Soviet Union and the United States also generally consider 1941 to be the start date, June 22nd for the former at the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, and December 7th for the latter following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, when Germany and Japan both declared war on the US to 1945. It involved 62 out of the 73 existent/independent states at that time, which eventually formed two loose, opposing military alliances: the Allies or Allied powers (China, France, the UK, the USA, the USSR among others) against the Axis powers (chiefly Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan).

World War II is most commonly described as having been fought in two main theaters of warnote There were also relatively minor skirmishes, bombings or other actions in other portions of the world such as in the Arctic, North America, and the South Atlantic, but essentially they were the most extreme geographic outliers of the two main theaters. The European Theater was the conflict between the Allied Powers against Germany, Italy and their European allies. This conflict was fought not only in Europe, but in the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa. This conflict began with the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and ended in May 1945 with the fall of Berlin and Prague. The Pacific Theater was the conflict fought between the Allies and Imperial Japan in the Pacific Ocean and Asia, which also included some action in the Indian Ocean. This conflict was born out of the Second Sino-Japanese War which started when the Japanese Empire invaded China in July 1937. This war became part of the 'world war' proper when Japan attacked Allied and American territories in December 1941.

It was the most intensive and extensive war in history, with more than 100 million people serving in military units. In a state of "total war", the major participants eventually placed their entire financial, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, thereby erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. This included the enslavement of enemy POW and civilians as manual labourers, or coerced 'recruitment' as police and soldiers, by the Axis powers. The European Axis powers also perpetrated a number of genocides to maximise their economic performance and national security during the war. These programmes of enslavement and genocide are considered part of the The Holocaust, which was integral to the War Aims of the European Axis. Had they been victorious, these programmes would have been expanded considerably.

The war was also marked by the large-scale aerial bombardment of civilian populations and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, and resulted in some 50 to 70 million dead (some higher estimates go to a nice round 100 million by counting the unborn... or just by simple, and usually not deliberate, miscountingnote One infamous error made by someone compiling figures for military dead, missing, and wounded in the Soviet-German War/Ostfront was made by someone missing a zero, thereby claiming that a Soviet force lost more troops in a single operation/campaign than there were in the entire Red Army. Someone else also arrived at an infamous estimate of 40+ million Soviet dead (versus a usual estimate of no more than 28 million) during the war by effectively mis-counting 'wounded' soldiers as 'dead' soldiers (no more than 20-30% of 'wounded' soldiers died at any point; this guy assumed that it was considerably more than that) and failing to account for the Poles ethnically cleansed (forcibly evicted) from the western USSR in the immediate post-war period. Although the USSR was supposedly his specialty, he also put Chinese dead at 30-40 million (versus a usual estimate of no more than c.10-20 million) by choosing the highest possible estimate of war-dead and attributing the c.10 million dead of the later Chinese Civil War and post-war CCP purges (1946-50) to the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). This is how he managed to arrive at a figure of 100 million dead, even though there's really no way it could've been more than 70. ) - making this war the deadliest and costliest conflict in human history.

The US's media depictions of the war are often accused of ignoring the contributions of other states, nations, and nation-states to (winning) the war - with the USSR's pivotal role in particular being almost completely ignored due to (lingering) Cold-Waranti-Communist sentiment. Post-Soviet Russian media might now quite justly be accused of Russia Wins The War due to it ignoring both the contributions of the other republics that made up the USSR (Ukraine, Estonia, etc.. etc.) as well as all the other countries and peoples who fought The Axis. The historian Stephen Ambrose points out that the title of this trope is literally true, in that although (for example) Britain was nominally one of the victors, it survived the war with major bomb damage and in extreme debt, whereas America was the only allied nation that finished the war better off than it had started it.

An inverse trope might well be 'Nazis Fight Alone'. The only Axis troops ever seen in most media are the Germans - the Italians very rarely make an appearance (aside from North Africa, and even then they still usually give way for more Germans), and the Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Finns, and various SS volunteer units like the Northland (Scandinavians), Charlemagne (French), and Blue (Spanish) divisions are almost entirely absent. Quisling logistics troops including the Hiwis (Soviet citizens who served the Heer), are also never seen. Even the Japanese get the short end of the stick, as it's incredibly rare to see a work that focuses on the Pacific front, and even moreso to see such a game that doesn't do so at the exclusion of the European theater.

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: The Trope Namer. The USA was nominally neutral at the beginning of the war, although its trade embargo against Japan and its lend-lease policy with the British and quiet participation protecting British shipping from German U-Boat attacks on its side of the Atlantic was annoying the Axis powers. However, the Axis powers, despite warnings from Ignored Expert authorities like Admiral Yamamoto, eventually went out of their way to provoke the United States into joining the fight. The result was that a country with a large population and a massive industrial base that was completely beyond the reach of any military attack (except for its shipping), and with an underestimated will to win at almost any cost, was now on the same side as Britain and the USSR. The night Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he went to bed with a deep sense of relief, because he knew that at long last America was going to join the war and that allied victory, although it might take a long time, was nevertheless inevitable.

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: The Trope Maker in the world's consciousness. The truth is a lot more complex and nuanced. Very few people (like General Charles De Gaulle) saw the point in fighting on once France had 'already lost' The Battle Of France - Marshall Pétain's coup had a lot of popular support - and they saw no hope of Germany ever being defeated. But as they became increasingly sure that Germany would lose the war (Stalingrad, Donbass, North Africa, Kursk, central Ukraine) resistance groups were founded with the aid of existing organisations such as the French Communist Party. By Mid-1944 they were ready to welcome The Allies' return with some of the best espionage work the world has ever seen. General de Gaulle's Free French Forces also contributed several thousand combat troops to battles such as Bir Hakeim, Monte Cassino and Ouistreham (on Operation Overlord's D-Day), and once France was liberated they formed an army several hundred thousand strong to take over support roles and free up Anglo-American troops for the front lines (by taking charge of besieging the last German pockets on the Atlantic coast for instance).

Les Collaborateurs: The Trope Namer was the government of The State of France (head of state Marshal Petain, official capital Paris, de facto capital the spa-town of Vichy), part of which operated under German military control. See also The Quisling below.

No Swastikas: The entire rationale behind the taboos on the swastika and the Rising Sun, in fact. Unless it's a historical documentary with archive footage, it's almost impossible to see swastikas even in period pieces set during the war.

Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The entire contemporary world is forged in the aftermath of the Second World War. No facet of modern life, social mores, culture, science and general worldview was left untouched. The Allied Powers created several institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, as well as start an ongoing debate about nuclear weapons (that is still ongoing) and human rights abuses and government measures to curtail the same.

The Quisling: Trope NamerVidkun Quisling, who betrayed his country to the Nazis and got stood up in front of a firing squad after the war. Other Quislings of World War II include President Wang Jingwei of China, Marshal Philippe Pétain and Prime Minister Pierre Laval of France and General Andrei Vlasov of The Soviet Union. Quisling, Laval and Vlasov were (tortured and) executed, Pétain's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment due to his advanced age and (by that time) severe dementia, and Jingwei died of natural causes before the war was over.

La Résistance: The Trope Namer was active during this war in France, but every occupied country had a resistance movement to one degree or another. Some countries actually had more than one movement - e.g. a communist one plus a monarchist one (it wasn't unusual for them to end up fighting each other as well). China had so many turncoats-turned-resistance fighters-turned-bandits that the historical community generally wrings its hands and splits it up into local and regional warlords, nationalist guerrillas, communist guerrillas and Chinese Communist Party guerrillas, with some room for overlap.

The Jericho Trumpet was removed from later models of the Stuka, as the Germans quickly came to the conclusion that equipping a bomber with its own air raid siren to warn the enemy was counter-productive. Not to mention that the sirens purportedly caused drag and the lack of siren prior to being bombed ended up being a nasty surprise.

Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Nazi Germany developed some advanced technologies that were ahead of their time, such as the first operational jet airplanes, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. German scientists also played a key role in the development of the US and Soviet ballistic missile and space programs after the war. But no jetpacks.

Those Wacky Nazis: The pervasive image of nazism led to this trope in popular culture.

Wartime Cartoon: Every major cartoon-producing studio in Hollywood produced propaganda cartoons with various aims (supporting the war effort, vilifying the enemy and so forth). Other nation such as Germany, Japan and USSR also produced propaganda cartoons.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy